Burton asked after Hodgson in several letters to Milnes, asking to be remembered, for instance, in a letter of April 1862, to ‘the amiable trio, Hodgson, Bellamy and Hankey’. A letter of March 1863, written while belatedly honeymooning in Tenerife, suggests that the flagellatory antics of the Cannibals were not limited to members only. Referring to Milnes’ elevation to the peerage, Burton joked:
Are you a peer yet, do you feel peerish, and how is that strange sensation? Anything of Hankey? I suppose Bellamy is still fending off the angry fiend. The poor Stewart! I had not time to confectionner un orgie chez elle. I left Hodgson the Gen’l sweating under the pangs of a baulked ambition & should be glad to know that he has ejected the irrelevant matter.
By 1873, Burton was speculating that ‘Fred Hankey must nearly have been burnt out’. He continued, ‘What has become of Tall Colonel (Hodgson)? Of Stuart alias Potter?’ ‘Stewart’, or ‘Stuart alias Potter’, was almost certainly a pseudonym of the flagellant madame Sarah Potter, who kept a series of brothels where her ladies could be spanked and even pricked with pins. Hodgson, Bellamy (who would later sign up for the first subscription edition of the Kamasutra), Burton, Milnes, Charles Duncan Cameron (the Abyssinian Consul who later disappeared from England under a cloud) and several other members of the Cannibal Club were almost certainly her clients. The conversation of their dinners must have made the air turn blue.
Hardly were the Anthropological Society and the Cannibal Club up and running than Burton was appointed Consul in Santos, Brazil. Milnes had persuaded the Foreign Office to give his protégé a chance. In May 1865, the Society gave its founding member a farewell dinner. As a special dispensation, Burton’s wife was allowed to listen from behind a screen, thrilling with her usual anxious pleasure that her husband would say the wrong thing to the wrong person. ‘He adored shocking dense people,’ she later recalled. ‘I have frequently sat at the dinner-table of such people, praying him by signs not to go on, but he was in a very ecstasy of glee; he said it was so funny always to be believed when you were chaffing, and so curious never to be believed when you were telling the truth.’
Brazil, unfortunately, failed to offer Burton the rich anecdotes and anthropological insights that the East had provided. Even while he was living and travelling in South America, his thoughts began to return to India. He began work on translating another set of Hindu folk tales, freely adapting and generously expanding upon a part of the Vetalapancavimsati, a collection of stories within a narrative frame rather like the Scheherazade story of the Arabian Nights. In Burton’s version, eventually published in 1870 under the title of Vikram and the Vampire, a king (Vikram) enters into a bargain with a living corpse or baital (the vampire), who tells him a series of riddling stories on successive nights. Burton’s feelings about Vikram and the Vampire were hardly passionate: he advised his publisher merely that the tales were ‘not without a quaintish merit’. It was, however, a first step on the road towards his final incarnation as a translator. As he himself later commented, the work was ‘the rude beginning of that fictitious history which ripened to the “Arabian Nights” Entertainments’. It was also the first step towards The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana.
In Vikram and the Vampire, Burton grappled with what could be rendered explicitly in a printed book and what could not. As the vampire tells the king:
Whilst they were making their offerings, a bevy of maidens, accompanied by a crowd of female slaves, descended the opposite flight of steps. They stood there for a time, talking and laughing and looking about them to see if any alligators infested the waters. When convinced that the tank was safe, they disrobed themselves in order to bathe. It was truly a splendid spectacle – ‘Concerning which the less said the better,’ interrupted Raja Vikram in an offended tone.
The interruption is in fact Burton’s own. He also appended a footnote that, typically, showed off his personal acquaintance with Hinduism: ‘Light conversation upon the subject of women,’ he claimed, ‘is a personal offence to serious-minded Hindus.’ And yet, as Burton would have very well known, offence was more likely to be taken by his own bourgeois, English readers than by some imaginary Hindu – serious-minded or not.
Five years after Brazil and Vikram, Burton was awarded a far more satisfactory posting: to Damascus. Again, Milnes had been at work on his friend’s behalf. It was here, in 1869 or perhaps 1870, that a more promising project seized Burton’s attention. He heard some intriguing news from Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, his old friend from India. Arbuthnot told Burton that he and a Bombay colleague, Edward Rehatsek, had been discussing the urgent need for Oriental texts to be translated into English. An eccentric man of Hungarian origin, Rehatsek worked as a professor of Latin and mathematics at Bombay’s Wilson College, but his principal passion was for the study and translation of texts – many of them erotic – from Persian. Arbuthnot wondered whether Burton, with his Arabic skills and his interest in the study of sexuality, would be interested in developing a series of translations of Eastern erotic classics alongside himself and Rehatsek. For his part, Arbuthnot was thinking of translating Kalyanamalla’s Ananga Ranga.
Burton may have known the manuscript from his time in India. As it was a relatively recent manifestation of the kama shastra tradition and one that had been taken up by the Muslim aristocracy, copies could be found in India with relative ease. A version of the Ananga Ranga in Marathi – the language of Maharashtra, the region around Bombay – had even been published in 1842, the very year of Burton’s arrival in India. Certainly, by the time Burton wrote his ‘Terminal Essay’, he had already collected copies
in Sanskrit and Maráthi, Guzrati and Hindostani: the latter is an unpaged 8vo of pp. 66, including eight pages of most grotesque illustrations showing the various Asan (the Figuræ Veneris or positions of copulation), which seem to be the triumphs of contortionists. These pamphlets lithographed in Bombay are broadcast over the land.
The aside about the Bombay lithographs is classic Burton. Only he, with his unique, disguised entrée into Indian society and mastery of local languages, would have been able to investigate such an aspect of ‘native’ culture. Equally, only the anthropologist Burton would have cared to: other sahibs, coralled as they were in their English-language cantonments, would never learn, or want to learn, what went on in the bedrooms of their inferiors.
Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot might have seemed a surprising candidate for the editorship of a notorious work of Indian erotology. A career civil servant in the Bombay government who rose to the position of Collector – a job which required him to set the rate of toka, or land tax revenue – Arbuthnot was, in the words of Burton’s early biographer Thomas Wright, ‘a man of the world, but quite untainted by it’. As a young man he had a rounded, almost effeminate cast of face, with finely arched eyebrows and a sensual mouth. He was known for ‘the sweetness and serenity’ of his manner. And yet, ‘like so many of your quiet men, he had a determination – a steady heroism, which made everything give way. Oppose Burton, and you would instantly receive a blow aimed straight from the shoulder; oppose Arbuthnot and you would be pushed quietly and amiably aside – but pushed aside nevertheless.’ Arbuthnot and Burton had first met in India, in 1853, when Burton was staying in Bombay while writing up his pilgrimage to Mecca. Like Speke, Arbuthnot was another of the younger men that Burton periodically took under his wing. Unlike Speke, Arbuthnot would prove a faithful friend and was largely content to remain the junior partner in the relationship. Burton even called his disciple ‘Bunny’, the only friend he honoured with a nickname.
According to Isabel Burton, writing after her husband’s death, Arbuthnot was Burton’s ‘best friend for the past forty years’. They certainly shared a restless curiosity about matters sexual, and perhaps some private predilections too. During Arbuthnot’s first furlough in England, from 1859 to 1860, Burton introduced him to Richard Monckton Milnes, and it is likely that Arbuthnot met members of Milnes’ transgressive coterie, perhaps even participating in t
heir activities. A letter from Burton to Milnes mentions hearing from ‘Boy Bunny’ in the same breath as speculating on Fred Hankey’s health and asking for news of Hodgson and the flagellant brothel-keeper Sarah Potter-alias-Stewart. Arbuthnot himself seems to have been at least aware of Potter’s business: writing to Bellamy in 1884, to arrange a meeting, he mentioned that he was ‘very glad to hear that you saved some of Potter’s things from destruction. I saw the man they were left to, who informed me that he ought to have destroyed them all.’
In 1872, during a second furlough in England, Arbuthnot brought with him the finished manuscript of the Ananga Ranga and showed it to his friend. Burton was not impressed. He told Richard Monckton Milnes that Arbuthnot’s draft was ‘rather dull’ and mused that it was ‘curious to see the deadening effect of Indian air, even upon that merriest of boys. He actually talks of early history!’ It seemed that Arbuthnot’s more earnest scholarship was already rubbing up against Burton’s relatively swashbuckling attitude. This was the beginning of the debate that would later swirl around the Kamasutra. Was the Ananga Ranga an instructive document with much to teach the West and, as such, an important addition to every Oriental library? Arbuthnot certainly seemed to think so as the worryingly unscientific astrological and alchemical material was relegated to an appendix. Or was it an erotic classic, with wider commercial application? Burton was well aware that he could present the book as anthropological. Just as National Geographic photographs of bare-breasted women would be thought acceptable by a later generation on the grounds of their ‘ethnological’ aspect, so the descriptions of early Indian society in the Ananga Ranga could provide a scholarly fig-leaf for the ‘pornographic’ content. And, of course, erotica could make anthropology sell.
Burton selectively polished up Bunny Arbuthnot’s over-earnest draft to his own, more salacious satisfaction. He appended his usual thoughtful, esoteric footnotes, and inserted plentiful local colour to boot. An entire additional paragraph focused on one of his own, private sexual obsessions.
The wife will remember that without an especial exertion of will on her part, the husband’s pleasure will not be perfect. To this end she must ever strive to close and constrict the Yoni until it holds the Linga, as with a finger, opening and shutting at her pleasure, and finally, acting as the hand of the Gopala-girl, who milks the cow. This can be learned only by long practice, and especially by throwing the will into the part to be affected… While so doing, she will mentally repeat ‘Kamadeva! Kamadeva,’ in order that a blessing may rest upon the undertaking.… Her husband will then value her above all women, nor would he exchange her for the most beautiful Rani (queen) in the three worlds. So lovely and pleasant to man is she who constricts.
It’s hard to imagine the passionately Catholic Isabel invoking the god Kama under her breath while constricting her yoni. Not content with making up his own sexual advice, Burton added a typically anthropological footnote that suggests the point was not so much that Isabel employed the ‘pompoir’ technique, but that she was ignorant of it.
Amongst some races the constrictor vaginæ muscles are abnormally developed. In Abyssinia, for instance, a woman can so exert them as to cause pain to a man, and, when sitting upon his thighs, she can induce the orgasm without moving any other part of her person. Such an artist is called by the Arabs, ‘Kabbazah’, literally meaning ‘a holder’, and it is not surprising that the slave dealers pay large sums for her. All women have more or less the power, but they wholly neglect it; indeed, there are many races in Europe which have never even heard of it. To these the words of wisdom spoken by Kalyana Malla, the poet, should be peculiarly acceptable.
Following his creative edit, Burton told Arbuthnot in 1873 that he was happy for the text to be sent to the printers. By chance, 1873 was a landmark year for Indology. That winter, the archaeological explorer Alexander Cunningham had investigated the remains of a brick-built city in the Punjab, which would later be dated to the third millennium BC. The private printing of a sixteenth-century sex book might not seem to have the same potential impact as the Harappa finds, but both events represented an important step in the West’s discovery of Indian civilization. At least, the Ananga Ranga represented a kind of rough archaeological survey of the ground – the digger’s spades were yet to strike the Kamasutra, the greatest and most ancient remnant of the obscure civilization that was India’s erotic culture. In a wider sense, the ‘discovery’ of both Harappa and the Ananga Ranga belonged to the same Western project of absorbing from the East all the aspects of culture that it did not already possess. The staggering antiquity of pre-Classical civilization – a culture soon colonized in retrospect as ‘Aryan’ or ‘Indo-European’ – was one such contribution. Erotology was another. Indeed, as the West groped its way towards Freud, an elaborated and authoritative science of eroticism was what it urgently lacked.
Arbuthnot, or more probably Burton, changed the title from Ananga Ranga to Kama Shastra, or the Hindoo Art of Love (Ars Amoris Indica). The new title’s unwieldy length resulted from its functioning as a series of codes, each aimed at a different audience. The ‘Kama Shastra’ part of the title hinted at Arbuthnot’s and Burton’s ambitions for their book’s impact on the world of Indology. The new title suggested that the Ananga Ranga was a key text from the great tradition of erotic science – rather than simply a handy guidebook on how to have better sex. For the layman pornophile, ‘Hindoo Art of Love’ was explicit enough, while the Latin subtitle, aimed at the Classicists, was suggestively borrowed from Ovid’s erotic poem, Ars Amatoria. A brief passage of marketing copy further emphasized the connection: ‘This work may fairly be pronounced unique from the days of Sotades and Ovid to our time,’ it advertised. The word ‘Sotadic’ – drawn from the name of the Greek author of a few obscene poetic satires in the third-century BC – would become Burton’s favourite euphemism for ‘homosexual’.
Not content with altering the title, the translators went to some lengths to obscure their own identities and their ambitions for the book. The title-page bore the legend: ‘Translated from the Sanskrit and Annotated by A.F.F. and B.F.R. For private use of the Translators only, in connection with a work on the Hindoo religion, and on the manners and customs of the Hindoos.’ Making their book seem subordinate to a larger and more scholarly work only betrayed Burton’s and Arbuthnot’s nervousness. For a time, they even considered translating the entire text into Latin, ‘that it might not fall into the hands of the vulgar’. But
further considerations satisfied us that it contains nothing essentially immoral and much matter deserving of more consideration that it receives at present. The generation which prints and reads literal English translations of the debauched Petronius Arbiter and the witty indecencies of Rabelais, can hardly be prudish enough to complain of the devout and highly moral Kalyana Malla.
This claim, of course, is blatantly rhetorical, a way of making their motives look more altruistic. Publishing the text in English, it was suggested, was not done to shock or pander to the tastes of the vulgar, but because the text itself was essentially moral in its aims. This tendentious statement apparently rested on Kalyanamalla’s own conclusion, that ‘Monotony begets satiety, and satiety distaste for congress’ and that from this in turn result ‘polygamy, adulteries, abortions, and every manner of vice’. Accordingly, the book showed ‘how the husband, by varying the enjoyment of his wife, may live with her as with thirty-two different women, ever varying the enjoyment of her, and rendering satiety impossible’. In truth, this entire passage was probably another of Burton’s creative insertions.
‘The vulgar’, sadly, never had a chance to get their highly moral hands on the Kama Shastra, or the Hindoo Art of Love. The printers ran off only four (or according to Burton, six) copies of the proofs before stopping to examine what they were actually printing. There was, predictably, an uproar and, whether through moral outrage or fear of prosecution, the printers absolutely refused to continue. Ironically, the stated desire of the translato
rs to print their text ‘for private use only’ was fulfilled, and Burton’s and Arbuthnot’s desire to become pioneer publishers of Indian erotic texts remained unsatisfied.
The life of the 1873 Kama Shastra was not, however, entirely snuffed out. Burton and Arbuthnot sent one of their precious copies to Victorian England’s most eccentric hobbyist, the chubby and amiable Henry Spencer Ashbee. Alongside his probable authorship of My Secret Life, a compendious work of pornography purporting to be the graphic details of ‘Walter’s’ liaisons with over a thousand women, Ashbee was hard at work compiling an earnest, three-volume descriptive catalogue of pornographic books. Like Richard Monckton Milnes, he combined bibliophilia with a general mania for matters sexual and a particular enthusiasm for flagellation. The first, 500-page volume of his weighty bibliography was printed in 1875 by James Henry Gaball of Brixton Hill, one of London’s more prolific clandestine printers. It was archly entitled Index Librorum Prohibitorum, after the Inquisition’s notorious list of banned books, and was apparently authored by one ‘Pisanus Fraxi’ – a play on the Latin words fraxinus (ash) and apis (bee).
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 10